


Pause

by Crowgirl



Series: Welcoming Silences [53]
Category: Foyle's War
Genre: Awkward Conversations, Ficlet, M/M, Trains
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-04
Updated: 2016-11-04
Packaged: 2018-08-29 00:31:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,045
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8468896
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Crowgirl/pseuds/Crowgirl
Summary: She can hear the sound of her own voice rattling away into nothing and sighs silently to herself, letting the story wander to a halt. It would be so much simpler if she could just ask the question and either of the men be able to answer it.





	

Sam wakes up when the train rattles to a stop. The carriage is dimly lit by a single shaded bulb just above her and she can feel a steady wave of cold coming from the corridor despite the door being shut.

She blinks and looks around, pushing herself up from the slump she’d apparently been sleeping in against the inner wall of the carriage. Her neck and left shoulder protest the move and then her cap drops in her lap when she moves her head to ease the ache. She sighs and tosses it onto the seat, rolls her head on her shoulders, then catches Mr. Foyle’s eye from across the compartment. As always, it feels a bit like realizing that a kindly but authoritative head teacher is watching her. ‘Sorry, sir.’

He shakes his head. ‘Not at all. It’s not exactly comfortable in here.’

‘Where are we?’ 

‘I’m not sure. Somewhere around Bournemouth, I think.’

‘Air raid?’

‘Probably.’ 

Sam nods and feels a hairpin slip down the back of her neck. She can’t possibly put her hair back up without a mirror and she might as well give into the inevitable so she starts to pull pins out one by one, making a pile on the dark green material of her skirt. ‘Where’s Mr. Milner?’

Mr. Foyle chuckles and nods towards what she had thought was a discarded coat in the outer corner of the seat. Sam blinks and, slowly, the heap of coat resolves into the outline of a sleeping man, his hat pulled over his eyes, one arm serving as a pillow. ‘Oh, my.’

‘Yes, well, he has been up for almost two days at this point.’ Mr. Foyle’s hand moves as if to touch a fold of the coat; at the last minute, the gesture changes into an aborted stretch and he buries his hands in his own coat pockets. 

Sam makes pairs of the hairpins in her lap, sliding them together in a way that her mother had always found frustrating: _‘No-one wants to have to pull their pins apart before they use them, Samantha!’_

A gust of wind rattles the windows in the corridor and Sam shivers involuntarily. There’s a yawn, and some rustling, and Mr. Milner sits up, his hat falling onto the floor as he moves. ‘Where are we?’

‘Not home yet,’ Mr. Foyle says, leaning forward and picking up the hat.

‘Lovely.’ Mr. Milner drops his feet to the floor and runs a hand back over his head, ruffling his hair. ‘Shall I go find out what’s going on?’

Mr. Foyle cranes to look out the corridor windows and shrugs. ‘If you’d like the exercise.’

Mr. Milner yawns again, then gets to his feet, pulling on his coat, and pushes open the door into the hallway. Sam shivers again at the fresh draft of cold air and slides along the seat into the far corner, stuffing the hairpins into her pockets so she can pull her coat closed. 

‘How are your new digs, Sam?’ Mr. Foyle asks after a moment of silence passes, dropping the hat on the empty seat.

‘Oh, fine. Haven’t been bombed out yet, you know, so--’ She smiles, trying to make a joke of it. ‘That’s got to be an improvement. How is Mr. Milner settling in?’

‘Excellently, as far as I’m concerned.’ Mr. Foyle smiles back at her. ‘I don’t think I’m a very demanding landlord but you’d have to ask him.’

‘You don’t run air raid drills in the middle of the night?’

‘I find work gets me up in the middle of the night quite regularly enough. Sergeant Milner, too, I think.’

She laughs and shrugs deeper into her coat, pushing her shoulders back into the thin cushion of the seat. ‘Yes, I suppose it does.’ There’s a further moment of silence before she offers, ‘It’s nice that you can be company for each other.’ It sounds wrong as soon as she says it and she hurries on, ‘I mean, I know after… Since his wife left, Mr. Milner was all alone in that big house and with Andrew off flying and--’ It just sounds worse and worse and she tries another tack: ‘I house-sat for my mother’s cousin in the village one summer. She had to go up to London for a week and she had this huge collection of ferns that needed looking after. I think I spent more time looking after the coal oil stove in her greenhouse than I did anything else.’ 

She can hear the sound of her own voice rattling away into nothing and sighs silently to herself, letting the story wander to a halt. It would be so much simpler if she could just ask the question and either of the men be able to answer it. For the first time, she feels a sharp sting of unfairness in not being able to do this. It isn’t like she’s very good with words at the best of times. ‘It -- just seemed like a lot of space. For one person. I can’t say I enjoyed it very much.’

Mr. Foyle is silent for a minute, his blue eyes sharp on her face and she does her best not to wiggle, hoping that what she can’t say is somehow visible to him. There’s certainly no other way she can get it across. He smiles at her finally but before he can say anything, Mr. Milner elbows open the compartment door again and comes in, his arms full of blankets. 

‘The guard says we might be here for another hour. They’re tracking planes over the Channel, so we can’t move.’ He offers Sam a folded blanket and adds, ‘These are with his apologies for the cold. And he says if we’re still here in the morning he’ll come around with tea -- he and the stoker keep a store.’

Mr. Foyle laughs and takes the one Mr. Milner offers him, shaking it out of the folds and tucking it around his legs. ‘How kind of him. ‘

‘Well, British Rail is a full-service concern,’ Mr. Milner says, grinning at Sam as he takes his own seat, very slightly closer to Mr. Foyle than he had been when they started this journey, wrapping the blanket around his shoulders.


End file.
